All the talk in CPUs at the moment is of Intel’s Core i7 and i5 ranges. But in terms of upgrades the older Core2Quads should not be overlooked. Upgrading from an older Core2Duo to a newer 45nm Quad can bring a huge performance increase.

Introduction

If you’ve been a reader of Mods-n-Clocks over the past year or so then you’ll know already that I was a great fan of the budget Intel E2100 series of CPUs and went out and bought a pair of E2160s. They overclocked 80%+ on air cooling and would run everything I could throw at them with relative ease.

However as time has moved on, a year in PCs is a long time after all, it has become apparent that having a quad core processor brings with it many benefits. One of these benefits for example is being able to play GTA:4 in all its glory!

The introduction of the i7 and now i5 series of CPUs has also pushed down the cost of the Q9550 and similar Q9000 series processors. What once cost several hundred pounds can now be bought for around £165. If you still want to pay over the odds there are places offering the old higher prices though. Maplin are selling the Q9550 for £339.99 for example.

Specifications

The Q9550 is a Socket 775 CPU based on the 45nm manufacturing process. It has a default clock speed of 2.83GHz derived from a front side bus speed of 1333MHz (333×4) and a multiplier of 8.5. Level 2 cache on the Q9550 comes in at a massive 12MB.

The most recent revision of the chip is the E0 and this is the one to look out for if you intend on overclocking the chip. There’s a previous revision which is C1 and it’s likely to hit slightly lower maximums when overclocking.

For your benefit, the codes engraved on the chip that refer to the revision are SLB8V for the E0 and SLAWQ for the C1. I should imagine that all the CPUs out in the stores are now E0 revision but be aware if buying second hand that a C1 is a little less valuable. Of course if everyone else is thinking this way too then you might find a C1 revision bargain and it is still a decent Quad Core CPU.

Packaging and Contents

Well what can I say really in this section? It’s all standard Intel box and packaging. In the retail box you get a stock Intel cooler with pre-applied thermal interface media, the processor itself and a variety of leaflets and booklets detailing specs and warranty terms and conditions.

As with all AMD and Intel CPUs this Q9550 is packaged so that it can be seen from outside of the packaging without having to break the seal. This is to help prevent the sale of counterfeit CPUs but it also helps in tracking down the right revision number when buying a brand new CPU. The store should be able to check the details on the CPU for you before you commit to buying.

Installation

Installing the Q9550 is pretty much like installing any 775 socket CPU. One thing that is important to remember is to reset your BIOS settings back to default before installing. For example the 1.5V that you had coursing through your 65nm E2160 to overclock it to 3.3GHz might not go down too well with your new 45nm Q9550. It’s also worth checking while you still have your old CPU in place that your motherboard BIOS version fully supports the new CPU, if not then a BIOS flash will usually sort it out.

As with all Intel 775 CPUs the pins are in the motherboard socket and not the CPU so there’s little chance of bending any pins. Just make sure to position the CPU in the correct orientation, there’s a marked corner for this purpose. Refer to your motherboard manual for more details.

Once the CPU is physically in place you’ll need to either fit the stock cooler or apply some thermal paste and a 3rd party cooler. I already have an Akasa Evo 120 cooler, so that is the one that I have fitted. This might soon change however as you’ll find out further into this review.

Once the appropriate thermal paste and heatsink and fan has been fitted then it’s boot up time and fun…

Performance

To measure the performance of this Q9550 CPU I’ve run a variety of benchmark tests. Like the graphics tests that I perform for graphics card reviews I run several different types of test for CPU reviews to give a good all round view of performance. There are pure benchmark tests like SuperPI and CPUMark which give an idea of raw power, tests like CustomPC Media Benchmarks which are semi-synthetic and give a better idea of real use performance and finally I run actual games/applications to show true performance levels.

First off as always is good old SuperPI this gives an idea of the single core power of the CPU. I run the 1M test as this is the one that other people tend to use in the enthusiast community.

The 1M test completes in a time of only 16.629 which is a good improvement over the older architechture processors. With my E2160 overclocked to 3.4GHz it could only reach ~17secs, whereas the Q9550 can beat that even at its default clock speed of 2.83GHz. For additional backward comparison it’s worth noting that my even older AMD Opteron 146 used to manage 27 seconds when clocked to 3GHz.

The next tests I’ve grouped together onto a single graph. CPUMark is the CPU only part of Performance Test from PassMark, for more information on these tests visit the PassMark website. The RealTemp XS Score is the benchmark that’s built in to the RealTemp temperature monitoring utility. On all of these tests a higher score is better. Realtemp is available as a free download so you can compare these results to your current setup but unfortunately PassMark only offer a free trial and then it’s ‘money please’!

PassMark Tests and RealTemp XS Score

These tests are still fairly new to me so I can’t really offer much in the way of comparison or comment at the moment on these. Although it is possible within the software to compare your system to an online database of other systems and results.

The following graph is of the CPU tests that can be found in the Everest program from Lavalys. This program is an all purpose PC testing and information application and it’s one that is quite popular even though you do need to buy it to unlock all of the features.

Everest CPU Tests

Again all four of these tests concern the raw ability of the CPU rather than relating to anything that you are likely to use your PC for. It’s still useful to have this data though as it makes for easy comparison against other CPUs.

Next up are the Custom PC Media Benchmarks. These are fixed automatically run benchmark tests but they perform actual media manipulations that you might do using applications that you could use. Test 1 performs a variety of photo enhancements on a large selection of photos using the Gimp application and the test is timed with a score given relating to the time taken to complete the test. The next test uses the Handbrake video encoding application to encode two videos from AVI source to a compressed video format. The final test plays back one of the videos encoding in the previous test on a loop while archiving a set of files into a zip archive, the test is timed and finishes when the archiving is complete, this final test is designed to test the multitasking ability of the PC.

CustomPC Media Benchmark

The custom PC benchmarks are interesting because the results are normalised against the performance of a reference PC running an E6750 processor. A score of 1000 is equal to the reference PC and a score of 1300 would be 30% faster etc. So at stock speeds the Quad Core Q9550 only manages to match the Dual Core E6750 in photo editing and even drops a little behind in the multitasking test. I does however blow away the E6750 completely in the video editing which we can deduce to be the most multi-threaded of the tests.

On the face of it this might be considered a disappointment for the Q9550 but the video editing test shows what it can really manage when it is required to.

So the testing that everyone’s actually interested in. How does the Q9550 respond in gaming? Well I’ve exposed the Q9550 to the hardware humbling GTA4, the CPU intensive Empire:Total War and the much resource lighter Left4Dead.

Gaming Performance

The GTA4 test is a very taxing test and makes the whole PC work hard to manage a playable frame rate. 24fps is at the very low end of playable but as long as it doesn’t happen often then you wouldn’t notice it too much, certainly an average of 41 is plenty playable. I’m sure with a little overclocking that minimum frame rate can be brought up to a better level. The Q9550 performed perfectly well in Empire:Total War and it absolutely walked Left4Dead, you might even say it left it for dead!

Temperatures

Running temperature is also an important performance indicator for a CPU and so I thought I’d better at least make a short comment on the temperatures that you are likely to see with this Q9550 installed in your system. The idle temperature for this Q9550 was taken by running/using the PC and then leaving it idle and allowing the temperature to fall to idle overnight. I leave RealTemp running on the desktop to record the minimum overnight tempertures for all four cores of the CPU which were 34, 35, 34, 33.

Temperatures

Load temperatures are taken by running Prime95 on all cores of the CPU and this time recording the maximum temperature reported by RealTemp. I use the small FFTs test in Prime95 as in my experience this tends to produce the highest CPU temperatures. The temperatures seen at full load for the Q9550 were 60, 57, 58, 56. Both the idle and load temperatures were taken with the CPU in my main desktop rig as it will run from day to day, no special high flow fans, no exposed test bench setups etc. Just an average midi tower PC case with low speed 120mm fans (~1000rpm) and my Akasa Evo 120 CPU heatsink and fan with a Nexus ‘real silent’ fan fitted.

These are very respectable temperatures, I’m especially pleased by how well the two dual cores are matched. The Q9550 CPU is actually a bundle of two dual cores rather than four single cores, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see a pair of temperatures and then another pair of temperatures at 2-3 degrees higher but if we look at the idle temperatures as an example, all four temperatures are almost spot on the same.

60 degrees maximum core temperature at full extreme load is also quite low, especially on a fairly normal level of air cooling. I suspect there will be a good amount of headroom for overclocking on this one, maybe an additional 1GHz on air taking it up to 3.83 from 2.83 but we’ll have to see.

In my limited time that I’ve had to try some overclocking on this CPU I found that reaching 3.4GHz required no tweaking at all, it would run with auto settings throughout, I just needed to drop the memory speed down to a reasonable level. I have also managed to push it up further, reaching 3.7GHz with a small increase of the CPU core voltage. Don’t worry I’ll include more in depth details of overclocking this CPU in a later article.

Conclusion

This is an excellent CPU. The Intel Core2Duo and Core2Quad ranges have been well regarded for a good few years now and the Q9450, Q9550 and Q9650 have been around for over a year. Yes, they’ve been superseded by the Core i7 range but that range is still pretty expensive especially if you are already setup with a good socket 775 motherboard.

Compared to the original prices of the Q9550 the current price makes it a steal for those of us who bought into the 775 architecture with a bargain basement CPU. It’s still a very high performing CPU and with some additional overclocking it will complete all the PC tasks you can throw at it with aplomb.

So in conclusion this is an excellent CPU for anyone wanting to upgrade a 775 system at the moment. It will provide a good performance boost over a dual core or even an early 6-series quad. It can be overclocked well, if not astronomically and barely costs a fraction of it’s original price these days. However for those people intending on building a system from scratch it would be worth looking towards the i5 and i7 series CPUs and some of the more recent AMD Phenom chips are good too. However, this would still not be a poor choice.

Overall Score: 9/10

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